Google is changing its disclosure policy for zero-day exploits - both in their own software as in that of others - from 60 days do 7 days. "Seven days is an aggressive timeline and may be too short for some vendors to update their products, but it should be enough time to publish advice about possible mitigations, such as temporarily disabling a service, restricting access, or contacting the vendor for more information. As a result, after 7 days have elapsed without a patch or advisory, we will support researchers making details available so that users can take steps to protect themselves. By holding ourselves to the same standard, we hope to improve both the state of web security and the coordination of vulnerability management." I support this 100%. It will force notoriously slow-responding companies - let's not mention any names - to be quicker about helping their customers. Google often uncovers vulnerabilities in other people's software (e.g. half of patches fixed on some Microsoft 'patch Tuesdays' are uncovered by Google), so this could have a big impact.

This sounds like the usual nonsense from someone who doesn't work software industry.

Long processes are in there to stop these sort of mistakes happening in the first place or worse making the situation worse.

Except I do work in the software industry and I've seen both sides. And you sound like you're suffering from a serious tunnel vision, probably because it's always been that way to you and it's become rather hard to think outside your cubicle.

Big companies have these long processes to prevent their army of brainless code monkeys from screwing up because they're too cheap to invest in proper development. So yes, they're entirely to blame when their customers' systems get compromised as a result of those long processes. This is just a way of shifting costs that's rather unique to the software industry.

Like I said, other industries have to do a refund, a replacement or a recall when security issues are discovered, and they manage perfectly fine with their own "long processes to stop these sorts of mistakes from happening".